These images are part of an ongoing series depicting life in rural Transylvania. I am drawn to this region and these people because it reminds me of a vanishing way of life that I experienced at my grandparent’s village in Hungary every summer. As a child, I was oblivious to the poverty and hardship that people faced and only saw the enchantment. With my camera I work to recapture this feeling of storybook wonder and show domestic tableaux and rural people as I remember them. My hope is to show the magic and poetry of the people who inhabit the “The Land Beyond the Forest.”
Katalina Simon is a Hungarian-British photographer who moved to the US in 2004. Influenced by her bi-cultural upbringing her work has focused on visual and oral history and personal narrative. Katalina has exhibited her work at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, MA, PhotoPlace Gallery in Middlebury, Vermont and Fountain Street Gallery in Boston, MA, among others. Katalina holds a BA in Russian from the University of Bristol in England and is a graduate of the Post-Baccalaureate Photography program at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design.
